The Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks

The Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks Judith Wellman Shortly after 11:00 a.m. on the bright, sunlit morning of July 19,1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton walked to the front of the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. The time had come to take public action, to inaugurate, as Stanton later recalled, "the greatest rebellion the world has ever seen." She was so nervous, she remembered, that she "wanted to abandon all her principles" and run away. But she did not, and the first women's rights convention of modern North America began.1 For the next two days, perhaps three hundred people met in the Wesleyan Chapel to discuss not only the "social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman" but also women's political rights, especially the right to vote. When the meeting was over, one hundred people (sixty-eight women and thirty-two men) had signed the Declaration of Sentiments, which was patterned after the Declaration of Independence, and asserted "that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—" Justas the colonists had brought charges against King George, so the signers at Seneca Falls brought charges against the men of America, against an establishment that legitimized male authority , denied women political rights (including the right to vote), gave husbands the power even to beat their wives, discriminated against women in employment, education, and property ownership, and took from women a sense of self-respect and of confidence in their own abilities.2 By using the Declaration of Independence as their model, women's rights advocates at Seneca Falls drew immediate public attention to their cause, and they initiated a new, activist phase of the women's rights movement. As the historian Ellen Carol DuBois has argued, 'Tor many years before 1848, American women had manifested considerable discontent with their lot. . . . Yet women's discontent remained unexamined, implicit, and above all, disorganized.... The women's rights movement crystallized these sentiments into a feminist politics... [and] began a new phase in the history of feminism." Certainly the fires of women's discontent had long been smoldering. The Seneca Falls convention fanned them into bright flames. More than any other place, Seneca Falls symbolizes the beginning of the modem US. movement for women's rights.3 This is the story of the one hundred signers of the Declaration of Sentiments. Who were they? And why did they sign a document that they © 1991 Journal of Women's History, Vol 3 No. ι (Spring) 10 JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY SPRING agreed was "of the kind called radical"? Because only eight days elapsed between the first newspaper announcement of the convention and the meeting itself, we might assume that those who attended were not simply isolated individuals. In fact, most of the signers were linked together by preexisting social networks.4 In 1888, Frederick Douglass, then editor of the North Star in Rochester, New York, and himself one of the signers, provided us a clue about the nature of these networks at the fortieth anniversary of the convention, held by the International Council of Women in Washington, D.C.: Then who were we, for I count myself in, who did this thing? We were few in numbers, moderate in resources, and very little known in the world. The most that we had to commend us, was a firm conviction that we were in the right, and a firm faith that the right must ultimately prevail.5 For Douglass, it was shared values rather than a shared relationship to material resources that brought these women's rights advocates together at Seneca Falls. One value, that of equality, was central to all of their lives. "All men and women are created equal," they had affirmed. So we might hypothesize that the networks that linked the signers would reflect egalitarian values. Secondary literature offers us more specific insights about the nature of those networks. Two standard approaches explain why the nineteenthcentury U.S. women's movement emerged when and where it did. The first one relates...